A Generation’s Facebook State of Mind

I think in Facebook-style status updates. As in, Shalini Ramachandran looks like a giant penguin in her jacket. Shalini Ramachandran thinks the bathroom in this museum is awesome. Shalini Ramachandran can’t wait till Friday to see her friends—heart heart heart.

Facebook Inc. may be going public, and may be worth tens of billions of dollars, but that hardly matters to me and most of my friends. Facebook is an extension of our minds—and our personalities. It is a chronicle of my 23-year old life—at least that portion since I joined Facebook on Nov. 16, 2005. As far as my Facebook timeline shows, no significant events happened in my life between my birth and that date.

My college years, for instance, are captured through a secret Facebook group with my best friends called “Voldemort H8ers United.” (Yeah, we are Harry Potter geeks.) It isn’t a leather-bound diary, but it is a treasure trove of stories about how we grew up and who we became—narrated in comments, pictures and 1,000-character posts.

When I traveled around Europe with my college roommate, pictures didn’t seem to matter unless they were “profile-picture-worthy” for Facebook (which I define as a picture where I look good or that is tastefully funny, preferably both.) We took lots of “profpics” together to use upon our return—notably one at the Louvre imitating the people in Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece, “Liberty Leading the People.” My friend was Liberty, and I was the people.

And Facebook is our portal to the political world. On the recent blackout day to protest the antipiracy bill before Congress, my Facebook newsfeed was overflowing with discussion about the legislation. During college, my friends and I got more of our breaking news from Facebook than any other news source. I saw “OSAMA’S DEAD” statuses on my newsfeed before I had a clue what had happened. After President Barack Obama’s speech that night, my friends launched into long, serious debates in Facebook status updates and comments about the impact of Osama bin Laden’s death. We were the 9/11 generation, and what mattered most to us as a collective society, we talked about on Facebook. As my friend Kishore Eechambadi asked about Facebook, “Is there even an aspect of my life it doesn’t touch?”

My friends and I remember the start of Facebook’s newsfeed, when we first began to find out what other people were liking and commenting about, in real time. It was frightening and engrossing all at once—it was as if we had a 24/7 microscope into other people’s lives, and they had no idea when we were looking.

Yes, nearly all of our time on Facebook consists of so-called Facebook stalking—looking through photos, statuses and profiles of our friends, whether it is to find out what our best friends are up to, learning more about the people we are interested in dating, or tracking archrivals in our fields.

But Facebook also has made us paranoid. We are very aware that our lives are no longer private, and cannot be in our professional world. My friend Kishore, a start-up entrepreneur in Chicago, learned that he needs to include his Facebook and Twitter information in every presentation to venture capitalists. “One of the first things I did was create a Facebook page for our company,” he said.

But generally, despite our gripes or our Facebook-inspired depressions, we are inextricably bound, caught up in this confusing extension of ourselves. At times, it feels as if who we are in flesh and blood matters less than who we are on Facebook. For myself and my friend Daniel, a 23-year-old information-technology analyst in Atlanta, sometimes it feels like too much.

“I don’t want to be the people who, rather than living their lives and sharing their lives on Facebook, their lives are Facebook,” he said.